with presentations in their simplest form, i.e. as sensations and movements, we have:

Of the three constituents, thus logically distinguishable but not really separable, the first and the third correspond in the main with the receptive and the active 'powers of mind' described by the older psychologists. The second, being more difficult to discriminate, was, as we have seen, long overlooked; or, at all events, its essential characteristics were not distinctly marked. It was either confounded with the first, which is its cause; or with the last, its effect. But perhaps the most important of all psychological distinctions is that which traverses both the old bi-partite and the prevailing tri-partite schemes, viz. that between the subject, on the one hand, as acting and feeling, and the objects of this activity on the other. This distinction lurks indeed under such terms as faculty, power, consciousness; but none the less they tend to keep it out of sight. What are here called objects or presentations are not the products of a sort of creative activity pertaining to the conscious self, which it is somehow mysteriously stimulated to exert. They have properties and laws of their own, in accordance with which indeed their interactions may be modified, but that is all. It was perhaps a wild dream of Herbart's that there could ever be a statics and dynamics of presentations; but his attempt may at least serve to exhibit more impressively the large amount of independence there is between the subject of consciousness and its objects. Keeping this distinction in view-instead of crediting the subject with an

1 To cover more complex cases, we might here add 'or in the train of ideas.'

indefinite number of faculties or capacities, we must seek to explain not only assimilation, differentiation, reproduction, association, &c., but all varieties of thinking and acting, by laws pertaining primarily to ideas or presentations, leaving to the subject only the one power of variously distributing that attention upon which the effective intensity of a presentation in part depends. Of this single subjective activity, what we call activity in the narrower sense (as e.g. purposive movement and intellection) is but a special case, although a very important one.

According to this view, then, Presentations, Attention, Feeling are not to be regarded as three co-ordinate genera, each of which is a complete 'state of mind or consciousness,' ie. all alike and severally included under this one supreme category1. There is, as Berkeley long ago urged, no resemblance between activity and an idea; nor is it easy to see anything common to pure feeling and an idea, unless it be that both possess intensity. Classification seems, in fact, to be here out of place. Instead, therefore, of the one summum genus, 'state of mind or consciousness' with its three co-ordinate subdivisions, cognition, emotion, conation, our analysis seems to lead us to recognise three distinct and irreducible components, Attention, Feeling and Objects or Presentations, as together constituting one concrete state of mind or psychosis. Of such concrete states of mind or psychoses we may then say-so far agreeing with the older, bi-partite psychology-that there are two distinguishable -but normally inseparable-forms, corresponding to the two ways in which attention may be determined and the two classes of objects attended to in each, viz. (a) the sensory or receptive attitude, when attention is non-voluntarily determined, i.e. where feeling follows the act of attention; and (b) the motor or active attitude, where feeling precedes the act of attention, which is thus determined voluntarily.

To assert that feeling and attention are not presentations will seem to many an extravagant paradox. If all knowledge is

1 Among German psychologists it has been common of late to use the term Erlebnis in a wide sense to cover what is common to cognitions, feelings and conations-viz., that they are all events experienced or 'lived through.' But the point, then easily overlooked, is that each of these miscalled 'elements' is not itself an Erlebnis, but each only a single function in one Erlebnis or experience: though, analytically distinguishable, they never actually exist apart.

concerned with presentations, how, it will be asked, come we to know anything of feeling and attention, if they are not presented? We know of them mediately through their effects; we do not know them immediately in themselves. This is, perhaps, but a more concrete statement of what philosophers have very widely acknowledged in a more abstract form since the days of Kantthe impossibility of the subjective qua subjective being presented. It is in the main clearly put in the following passage from Hamilton, who, however, has not had the strength of his convictions in all cases :-" The peculiarity of feeling, therefore, is that there is nothing but what is subjectively subjective; there is no object different from self,-no objectification of any mode of self. We are, indeed, able to constitute our states of pain and pleasure into objects of reflection, but, in so far as they are objects of reflection, they are not feelings but only reflex cognitions of feelings1." But this last sentence is not, perhaps, altogether satisfactory. The meaning seems to be that feeling "can only be studied through its reminiscence," which is what Hamilton has said elsewhere of the 'phænomena of consciousness' generally. But this is a position hard to reconcile with the other, viz., that feeling and cognition are generically distinct. How can that which was not originally a cognition become such by being reproduced? The statements that feeling is 'subjectively subjective' and that in it "there is no object different from self," are surely tantamount to saying that it is not presented; and what is not presented cannot, of course, strictly speaking, be re-presented. Instead, therefore, of the position that feeling and attention as such are known by being made objects of reflexion, it would seem we can only maintain that in this way we know of them by their effects, by certain changes, i.e., which they bring about in the character and succession of our presentations. But, while we cannot say that we perceive directly what attention and feeling, as such, are, inasmuch as they are not presented; neither can we with any propriety maintain that we are ignorant of them, inasmuch as they are by their very nature unpresentable. As Ferrier contended, " we can be ignorant only of what can possibly be known; in other words, there can be ignorance only of that of which there can be knowledge?" The antithesis between the

1 Lectures on Metaphysics, ii. p. 432.

2 Institutes of Metaphysics, § II, Agnoiology, prop. iii. sq.

objective and the subjective factors in presentation is wider than that between knowledge and ignorance. That is an antithesis pertaining to the objective side alone; but this is the ontological antithesis, so to say, between Self and Not-Self, the antithesis which our experience-at any rate-presupposes and therefore can never transcend.

We ought also to bear in mind that the effects of attention and feeling cannot be known without attention and feeling : to whatever stage we advance, therefore, we have always in any given 'state of mind' attention and feeling on the one side, and on the other a presentation of objects. Attention and feeling seem thus to be ever present, and not to admit of the continuous differentation into parts which gives to presentations a certain individuality, and makes their association and reproduction possible. To assume such differentiation on the subjective side is to lapse into the atomistic psychology of presentationism1. It is to lose sight of the Leben implied in Erlebnisse2.

1 Cf. ch. i, § 5, p. 23.

2 We shall have, of course, to return to this-perhaps the most difficult topic in psychology—when we come to attempt the special analysis of self-consciousness. What has been said above may suffice for this first general analysis.

CHAPTER III

THEORY OF ATTENTION

Consciousness' or 'Attention'?

§ I. It will be well to attempt here some further explication of the theory of attention advanced in the preceding chapter in place of the objectionable 'faculty-psychology' of the older writers. Instead of a congeries of faculties we have assumed a single subjective activity, and have proposed to call this

attention.

We started from the duality of subject and object as fundamental. Now we can often form a distinct conception of the relation between two terms when we have no such distinct conception of the two terms themselves. So here: without waiting to examine ontological theories about them we can at once ask how subject and object are related. We say of man, mouse or monkey that it feels, remembers, perceives, infers, desires, strives and so forth. Leaving aside the first term, it is obvious that all the rest imply both an activity and an object. The question then arises as to the possibility of resolving these instances and others like them into a form in which the assumed diversity of the act appears as a diversity of its object. An obvious difficulty confronts us at the outset. At first sight it looks rather as if the kind of activity might vary while the object remained the same; that e.g. having perceived an object, we later on remembered or desired it. It would then be most natural to refer these several activities to corresponding faculties of perception, memory and desire. This, indeed, is the view embodied in common speech, and for practical purposes it is doubtless the simplest and the best. Nevertheless, a more thorough analysis shews that when the supposed faculty is different the object is never entirely and in all respects the same. Thus in perception, e.g. we deal with